426234 - Add link to mycroft back to search tools landing page

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(addons.mozilla.org Graveyard :: Search Plugins, defect)

Description

[Michael Morgan [:morgamic]]

The link to mycroft has disappeared, we should add it back.

Comment 1

[Michael Morgan [:morgamic]]

Where do we put this?  Any ideas?

Comment 2

[Andy.J.S]

i can confirm this 
when clicking 
"manage search engines" from the search dropdown and then 
"get more search engines" this just takes us to
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browse/type:4

which are "search add-ons" not "search engines" as the title of the page implies
mycroft or mycrofts resources are nowhere to be found or anyway of getting there from any of the public channels, depriving the user of thousands of search engine plugins (not addons!) just as confusion there is a mini menu on teh bottom left of the 

To make it even harder for the user Google has indexed the address i posted 
but as the title of the landing page is incorrect the listing is useless the only way mycroft can be accessed is via a google search for mycroft which is not exactly a descriptive name, Mycroft is a great resource it needs to be featured or promoted just as well as the add-ons site, at the moment its all wasted (except for the experts who know it exists)

please update the site or change the urls within Firefox so a user is able to add search engines from mycroft

Andy

Comment 3

[Andy.J.S]

(dunno what happened to my previous comment about confusion ) heh,

anyway  stick it right on the front page ?

"ADD YOUR FAVOURITE SEARCH ENGINE TO $1"

or something ;)

MS do this on first run of IE7 (and make a big deal about it as they understand the importance)
could be an idea to do the same for Moz, Mycroft has a lot of resources, maybe even expand it to feature "this months recommended" and "top 10 Search engines"
to make the most of the resources available

regards
Andy

Comment 4

[Michael Morgan [:morgamic]]

Attachment: adds text back, using existing msgids if they were there, fuzzy if they weren't

Comment 5

[Michael Morgan [:morgamic]]

Comment on attachment 315891 [details] [diff] [review]
adds text back, using existing msgids if they were there, fuzzy if they weren't

This patch is wrong because it's marking things as fuzzy that shouldn't be.

Comment 6

[Michael Morgan [:morgamic]]

->3.4, it's lower priority and needs l10n.

Comment 7

[Mycroft Project (CC)]

(Apologies for not posting earlier but it would probably have come out as a rant and I was trying to resist the urge to tout my own wares but your lower priority comment encouraged me...)

While I'm at least partially motivated by self-interest, I think the removal of this link makes it significantly more difficult for a user to find a search engine plugin - if I look at the webcounter for Mycroft, on 26 March there were just under 32k page views (had been steady 28-30k since the start of the year) but on the 27th this dropped and has been about 10-12k since. These 'missing' 18000 page views per day suggest something like 2-4000 visitors per day are hitting the 'Get more search engines...' link, not finding what they want on AMO and whereas they used to follow a link to a further 15000 search engine plugins are now giving up or maybe googling and finding something (though not hitting Mycroft)or not finding what they were looking for.

I'm not sure if there is a master plan to effectively absorb the market of Mycroft & competitors but if you want me to explain why search engine plugins are not the same as addons / why I don't think that would be a great idea I'd be glad to do so but I'd prefer to leave that for another day.

In the mean time, I strongly urge you to put something in place to advertise the possibilities beyond the 22 currently available search engine plugins - is l10n any more of an issue than it was previously?

(You initially asked where to put such a link, I'd suggest a similar placing as before, at the bottom, but the trouble is each plugin now takes up so much room that I only see 3 above the fold and the 22 plugins are spread across 3 pages so maybe at the top would be more useful!?)

Comment 8

[Michael Morgan [:morgamic]]

Charles - this didn't go out last night, so we changed it from 3.2.1 to 3.4.  Have a couple of l10n fixes and we can push this change shortly.

Probably good that we didn't push it since we can work on making it more prominent.  Don't know of a master plan to absorb others, omission was not intentional at all.

Don't think l10n is a huge issue, it was just some difficulty I ran into with adding the msgids for the text block I added back in from the last version of the page.

Any ideas on where to place this in the page?

Comment 9

[Michael Morgan [:morgamic]]

I'm going to push this patch so it's there somehow.  In a future dot release (3.4.3, hopefully) we'll find a way to work it in and make it more prominent.

Comment 10

[Michael Morgan [:morgamic]]

Attachment: v2, restoring the block with partial fallback

Comment 11

[Wil Clouser [:clouserw]]

Comment on attachment 320618 [details] [diff] [review]
v2, restoring the block with partial fallback

r+ as long as this bug stays open so we can get some design work. :)

Comment 12

[Michael Morgan [:morgamic]]

r13054

Comment 13

[Michael Morgan [:morgamic]]

Put unsuckify-ing the search landing page in bug 433433.  Closing this one.

Comment 14

[Stephen Donner [:stephend] Not actively reading bugmail]

Verified FIXED for:

Firefox: https://preview.addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browse/type:4
SeaMonkey: https://preview.addons.mozilla.org/en-US/seamonkey/browse/type:4

Comment 15

[Mycroft Project (CC)]

Given bug 426085 shouldn't this be on:
https://preview.addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browse/type:4/cat:all?sort=name

(Incidentally, I'm not sure why Themes and Dictionaries were split back out of other categories but search plugins weren't - is there a bug on that?)

Comment 16

[Mycroft Project (CC)]

Sorry, I really don't think this is FIXED.
With bug 426085, a user has to click back up to the Search Tools category page to find this which is a click path I doubt many users will find:

Click dropdown
'Manage Search Engines...'
'Get more search engines...' (a.m.o/en-US/firefox/browse/type:4/cat:all?sort=name)
Can't find what I want here...
?Click Search Tools

Comment 17

[Stephen Donner [:stephend] Not actively reading bugmail]

Isn't this all covered by bug 433433, which was mentioned as a caveat in comment 13?

Comment 18

[Mycroft Project (CC)]

I would have said not.
This is a specific issue which I would say blocks the more general 433433.
(Which incidentally is pretty much a dupe of 426239)

Comment 19

[Michael Morgan [:morgamic]]

This bug isn't about click paths or top-level navigation, it's about adding the links back.  433433 and 426239 are not dupes because one is specific to the landing page and the other deals with points of entry and top-level navigation -- but they do address the same problem, which seems to be the main motivation for reopening this.

I didn't get any response from comment #8, so simply adding the links back is sufficient for this bug.  We should have more discussion about click paths in bug 426239 and talk about the search plugins landing page in bug 433433.

Comment 20

[Mycroft Project (CC)]

ok, will discuss in the other bugs.
(I thought I'd half answered #8(and #1) in #7...)

Comment 21

[Michael Morgan [:morgamic]]

Charles - I'd also like to add that the landing page will be the destination of the "Get more search engines..." link.  The category listing is temporary until we have a better landing page that isn't as confusing.

Now:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browse/type:4/cat:all?sort=name

Will be (with a much better design from bug 433433):
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browse/type:4/

Comment 23

[Jo Hermans]

see bug 378934

Comment 24

[Michal 'hramrach' Suchanek]

Currently the ssteps for adding my favourite search plugin look like this:

1) click the down arrow
2) click the manage search plugins since I do not see it in the menu
3) click the inivisible get more search plugins link (which is invisible due to braindead theme colours)

4) get to the amo search plugins page which displays only about 3 plugins on a 17" portait screen !!
4) type the name of the search box at the top into the search box

result: a page saying "No plugins found"

expected: 

- a link like "Get more search engines at mycroft" at the very top of the page near the search box
- the same link at the bottom of the search results, especially the "No search plugins found"

The steps for adding my favourite search plugin, continued:
5) type mycroft.mozdev.org into the browser location bar to start the old 2-step process of installing search plugins. Alernatively, you can type mycroft into the search box and get a link to mycroft if guess mycroft might be in the amo search database. Still you have to click mycroft and then the homepage link.

This is certainly not fixed.

Comment 25

[melchior blausand]

confirming status
UNRESOLVED.
SUCKIFYING.

@morgamic: What is the specific problem in transporting mycroft.mozdev.org's data into the a.m.o./type:4 database?
I also suggest that the mycroft project's work be permanently "honorably mentioned" on a.m.o/type:4

@mycroft: For sure your dense layout is more usable that fancy a.m.o. I guess a design compromise would greatly bring forward our user experience.

Comment 26

[Wil Clouser [:clouserw]]

This bug is verified fixed - there is a link to mycroft on the page.  If you have suggestions or concerns you should express them on a mailing list or in a new bug, after reviewing the Bugzilla etiquette requirements https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html

Thanks